Bruce Launches a Patreon!

Guess what? I’m writing another novel. Wahoo! Two novels, actually, but it’s taking a lot more time than I’m used to. What gives?

In the past, and with the aid of deadlines imposed by my previous publishers, I've published 10 novels. 

 

Shelf of previous novels

Without a deadline imposed on me, I've finished… 0 novels (though I've started two).

See the problem? I've got the aforementioned 2 novels I'd like to complete, but it's easy to let my RPG-writing day job take up all my "writing spoons" without a novel-writing deadline to motivate me to make mental space for both.

WHICH IS WHY PATREON COULD BE JUST THE TICKET! (Ahem.) Please consider joining me. I'm always looking for a good accomplice, collaborator, or co-conspirator.

In addition to other Patreon perks for my patrons, I’ll be providing excerpts from in-progress novel chapters, short stories, and game design work, as well as occasional thoughts and strategies on writing fiction and RPGs. Most perks will be for patrons. But not always. In fact, this being my launch day, I face the prospect of getting the word out to anyone who might want to lend a hand. So, I’m sharing this excerpt widely! (And you’d have my thanks if you helped me spread it around a bit, too!)

Excerpt The Ark Of Broken Dreams:

The shadowy stairs and a man who wasn’t there dissolved as I opened my eyes. Bird song and dawn light feathered the pine canopy overhead. My hammock swayed a bit, probably momentum left over from a bit of unconscious thrashing. Realization calmed my quick breaths and thudding heart. My shaky laughter filled the campsite. 

Across from the dead campfire in her own hammock, Shiela Gilbert watched me, her head poking from the top of her sleeping bag. “Why so happy?”

I smiled, actually glad to see her for once. “I just had a nightmare that scared the living shit out of me. I’m laughing because it wasn’t real.”

Her mouth quirked as she considered. “Hmm. Haven’t had one of those for awhile.”

Field geologist Shiela Gilbert was a no-nonsense achiever with little tolerance for ephemeral “crap,” as she called it. Things like the interests and concerns of other people, for instance. Or whatever nonsense they dreamed about at night. What got her excited was the discovery of new mineral deposits, stratification, subduction zone maps, and other things geological. Otherwise, she tended to tune others out.

“I still get bad dreams,” I admitted. “From time to time.” Though not usually ones so real. The dream reminded me of when I was a kid and stayed up late watching Creature Feature. A habit that had inevitably led to nightmares: blood stains on the floor that wouldn’t come out, mud men that pulled you underground to some unspeakable fate, and dead faces staring in through second story windows.

Although the nightmare I’d just had was completely new. I’d been watching something called “DEVILTRY” on tv. The show’s title had animated, then slithered right out of the screen into the real world, morphing into a sort of demonic dragon-thing. Whose teeth, though made of letters, were horrifyingly sharp. I ran, only to come face to face with something on the stairs.

You know those specks that sometimes float on the surface of your eyes? The little phantom dots, floating around that you can never quite focus on? That’s what the man coming down the stairs was made of. 

Yeah, like I said. A bad dream.

Thanks for reading! Please check out my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/brucecordell

Path of the Dead

Lantern in hand, Elandine walked the Path of the Dead under the light of the Seven Moons. Their cold radiance splintered on the raised road that wound for miles through the queendom. Crypts honeycombed the rampart beneath their feet. In those metal-clad and lightless cavities, the dead of Hazurrium were interred, from the lowliest beggars to royalty. According to tales told over campfires, the souls of the dead sometimes ventured up from the Night Vault to walk the Path of the Dead, looking for their loved ones to bid them goodbye.

“You won’t find her, Your Highness,” murmured Navar, who followed a few paces after the queen.

“I know,” the queen replied, her voice almost too soft to hear.

~text from Myth of the Maker, a novel of The Strange ~art by Cathy Wilkins.

Wanna Listen To Something Strange?

As of today (Feb 22, 2018), Myth of the Maker is available as an audiobook on Audible.com

(UPDATE: Are you outside the USA? Go to this Amazon link and click on Audible link there, which I hear is more likely to get you to the audiobook: http://amzn.to/2F33bnl)

Let me just say, this is just what I needed to make me feel better after that LAST blog article.

Carter Morrison, gazing out over Ardeyn

So if you're curious about the reason Carter Morrison killed his friends and himself—it was them or the end of all life on the planet—head over here give the sample a listen. If you like what you hear, well, having the whole thing is of course only a click away ;).

Myth of the Maker audiobook (inside US): https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Myth-of-the-Maker-Audiobook/B079K92F1Z
Myth of the Maker audiobook (outside US, click on Audible): http://amzn.to/2F33bnl

Want to know more about Myth of the Maker? Here's a good place to start: http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2017/04/myth-of-maker-is-now-available.html

Myth of the Maker is now available!

I wanted to write a science fiction novel that treated Fermi's Paradox. Why in this vast universe filled with billions of other galaxies is there is no evidence for any other intelligent alien life?

Myth of the Maker has an answer. It's related to what scientists call dark energy, a medium that my protagonists learn to call the Strange.

In Myth of the Maker, computer programmer Carter Morrison sacrifices himself and his friends, killing them and locking them in a virtual world—all to save the rest of the planet from certain destruction. Morrison’s friends have no idea what he’s done—but as the “planetvores” approach, they must come to terms with the fictional worlds they now inhabit, which serve to insulate the real world from the horrors without. Not all of them are satisfied with their forced martyrdom, either, and a man named Jason Cole—known as The Betrayer—seeks a way out of the fiction and back to reality, no matter the cost.

(If you're curious about how I came to write this novel, check out this article Long Road To the Myth of the Maker.)

Amazon
http://amzn.to/2n7H4Uw

Audible (audiobook)
https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Myth-of-the-Maker-Audiobook/B079K92F1Z

Barnes & Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-strange-myth-of-the-maker-bruce-r-cordell/1125686165

Powell's Books
http://www.powells.com/book/myth-of-the-maker-9780857666505/62-0

Deluxe hardcover at MCG
https://www.montecookgames.com/myth-of-the-maker/

A Long, Strange Trip to Myth of the Maker

I started writing the novel Myth of the Maker a long time ago. It's been at least 4 years of actual writing, slow though that writing was, beginning in 2013. But the initial, flailing stages of conception probably go even further back. Maybe even to right around the time I decided to walk away from the third book in the Sword of the Gods series after the publisher decided to print the second in the series (Spinner of Lies) in e-book only, which wasn't part of my contract. ("Walk away" means I asked the publisher for a stay on writing the third book in my contract, and they agreed.)

Don't get me wrong; what happened wasn't personal. The same thing happened to most of the Forgotten Realms novels coming out at the time (unless your name rhymed with "are aye suave-a-boar*"). It was a business decision. I remain grateful and honored to have been part of the author bullpen writing books set in FR during that period. I wouldn't do anything different if I had it to do over.

But we can't get around the fact that publishing almost every novel previously slated for print as e-book-only effectively put paid to the Forgotten Realms novel line as it existed at that time, and signaled and end to my nine-book career as an FR author.

So I started working on something different, thanks in part to encouragement from editor and writer Torah Cottrill. I decided to write a science fiction novel. But well before finishing, the ideas underlying it spawned a game line called The Strange that Monte Cook and I co-wrote. Maybe you've heard of it? (If not, check out the video here.)

And now, at long last, Myth of the Maker is finished!

In a universe as vast as ours, with tens of billions of planets potentially supporting life, Enrico Fermi’s famous question—"Where is everyone?”—has never been more relevant. That’s what Katherine Manners learned when she discovered, in a secure server room, the melted form of an unknown man clutching a message of doom from another world. 

A world, it turns out, in orbit of our own. Hidden in the dark recesses of a nether dimension called The Strange. A dimension that hosts countless other micro-worlds, many copies—or recursions—of Earth itself. 

Worlds home to beings sometimes jealous of our own. Worlds filled with dangers and riches, mysteries—and answers. 

But the opening of these worlds also draws the attention of creatures capable of devouring the Earth. Creatures that may have been the doom of every civilization that advanced enough to discover The Strange. Creatures that hunger—and now know we exist.

I read an excerpt of the first chapter of the novel here. Get prepared to be AMAZED at my reading-in-front-of-the-camera abilities ;).

You can read an excerpt of the novel here. I believe it's the entire first chapter!

Amazon
http://amzn.to/2n7H4Uw

Angry Robot (the publisher)
http://www.angryrobotbooks.com/shop/sf/the-strange-myth-of-the-maker/
Barnes & Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-strange-myth-of-the-maker-bruce-r-cordell/1125686165

Powell's Books
http://www.powells.com/book/myth-of-the-maker-9780857666505/62-0

Deluxe hardcover pre-order at MCG
https://www.montecookgames.com/myth-of-the-maker/

*No disrespect intended to Bob Salvatore, of course! He's a mensch. It was his first FR books first few FR books that helped crystalize the realization that maybe I could try to do the same one day.